by Tim Bryant
“So I’m not even Alvis Curridge at all then,” I said.
Momma laughed at the very notion of it.
“Son, you are one hundred percent Alvis Curridge,” she said. “It don’t matter what they call you.”
Maybe that was a jab at people calling me Dutch, I don’t know. I had never asked to be called Dutch, but I did answer to it. As James Alto had once told me, some names you’re born with. Others you earn. Dutch, I had earned fair and square.
“What was Lonnie Boy’s family name?”
A lot of different trains of thought were simultaneously tracking through my mind. One was still the very real thought of walking out the door, even if I didn’t burn it all down behind me. But a whole new one was whispering me that maybe this wasn’t such a bad deal after all. It sure as hell explained why I didn’t look a damn like the old man, something I had always counted as a good thing. The news wasn’t all bad.
“Curridge, Alvis. You always been a Curridge. Couldn’t have been nothing else.”
I took a swig from the corn liquor, swished it through my teeth and suppressed the urge to spit.
“Lonnie Boy Curridge. What did you do? Copulate ‘em all until you found the one you liked best?”
If she had chosen Alvis over Lonnie Boy, Lonnie Boy must have been a real piece of work.
“It wasn’t like that, Alvis,” she said. “You just don’t know.”
Well, she was right about that. I didn’t seem to know a whole lot of things. But I had heard all I wanted to, so I finally optioned out and left the remainder of my pie and the whiskey behind to let her know I was serious.
When I cranked up the truck, I momentarily wondered, if I put the damn thing in first gear and just drove, would the International win or the front porch win. I was betting heavy on the truck.
4
Parker County Sheriff Hugh Muncey was out on his Sunday rounds. I asked what that might entail. Weatherford didn’t appear to be hopping with trouble. I turned out to be onto something, as he was eventually pinpointed, eating a late lunch at the downtown Methodist church.
I liked the look of downtown Weatherford. It looked like all the better parts of Fort Worth without all the dark corners. As fine as it seemed to be, it meant I would stick out like a turd in a wine glass. Muncey kind of did too. I saw him from half a block away, sitting on top of a wooden picnic table and looking toward the town square. If he was waiting for a parade, I was it.
“Sorry to hear about Alvis Sr.,” he said.
He was eating a baloney and cheese sandwich and using the Sunday news as a plate.
“He wasn’t my daddy,” I said.
I liked the way it sounded coming out of my mouth. I also liked the response on Muncey’s face. I took a seat on the far end of the table and pointed at the paper.
“What paper do y’all eat off of out here?”
He twisted it around and pushed it toward me.
“We read the Weatherford Democrat. We take our meals on the Star-Telegram.”
He was inquisitive, so I explained to him that Alvis Curridge had never been my daddy, that Lonnie Curridge, whom everyone seemed to remember as Lonnie Boy, had been. I didn’t think to mention that I had just received this information myself. I might have even implied that it was old news.
“Lonnie Boy Curridge?” he said.
I looked down at the newspaper and saw Ruthie Nell’s name on a front page byline. The article, at a glance, seemed to be about the water department and the drought that was parching the whole state, even in the middle of winter. More old news.
“He died a long damn time ago,” I said. “I’m more interested in this girl that died Friday night at the North Side Coliseum.”
He stopped stirring an empty spoon in his coffee and tapped it on the table.
“I got your message and had Floy look into it,” he said as a lady stepped out of the church building, walked over and refilled his cup. “She might possibly belong to a family here. Girl went missing a few months ago.”
The lady asked if I wanted a plate. I said yes and got an egg and cheese sandwich in wax paper and a tomato on the side with half a cup of coffee for my troubles.
“How old?”
He pulled a notepad from his shirt pocket and flipped through it.
“Fifteen in October?”
I ate the tomato first, slicing it up with my pocketknife, and then tackled the sandwich.
“Think you could find out a few things about this missing girl for me?”
He reckoned that could be done later in the day. On his rounds.
“She got a name?”
I watched to see if he would consult his notebook. He didn’t.
“Guzman,” he said. “Maime Guzman.”
I told him to ask Mrs. Guzman if her daughter was right handed or left handed. I even waited, in case he wanted to jot it down.
“So, if she says Maime’s right handed,” I said, “you can tell her I’ve got a feeling her daughter’s still out there somewhere.”
Muncey’s face now indicated he wasn’t sure if I was a crackpot or not.
“Right handed, huh?” he said.
If I expected him to follow through, I had to let him off the hook.
“I’ve got a hunch that our dead girl’s a lefty,” I said. “Her right arm is the one that got carved up.”
He nodded.
“Think she cut herself?”
He wasn’t so slow after all.
“I do,” I said.
Muncey was a decent guy. I’m sure he hoped the girl on the slab in Fort Worth was not Maime Guzman. And now, with me throwing him something to tie that hope to, he was at least a little relieved. At the same time, a new cloud rolled in.
“A suicide then,” he said.
Whoever had done the carving, if you could believe Bennie Enders, had deliberately left Elvis Presley’s name on her arm.
“Maybe she asked for an autograph,” I said.
It was the biggest meal I’d had in ages. The best too. I took one last cup of coffee while I tackled the other standing issue.
“Alvis Curridge Sr. still owned the land on Clear Fork. There’s twelve acres left, used to be twenty-five,” I said. “With his death, it’s to be split between momma and me.”
Muncey knew momma better than I did, which wasn’t saying much. He only knew me from talking to her.
“I’m assuming you’ve got no interest,” he said, “but understand. Mrs. Curridge is getting old. You want to keep that property in the family, you’re about all that’s left.”
I left Sheriff Muncey to continue his rounds with a promise to get back in touch on Monday. I would be taking a trip up to Cool, Texas to do some visiting, I said, and would stop in for a report on my way.
“So Lonnie Boy Curridge was your daddy,” he said as we walked back to my truck.
“That’s right,” I said.
He shook his head and kicked at a hole in the street.
“Now refresh my mind. Did Alvis have a brother they called Lonnie Boy, or you talking ‘bout the old man, Lonnie Curridge?”
It was a question I hadn’t been expecting. I had assumed Lonnie was a brother. Why else would they call him Boy? Maybe he was Alvis’ cousin. Alvis’ father? Maybe I was a little hasty in leaving momma and the buttermilk pie. I didn’t answer.
“I guess you know it was the Parker County Sheriff’s Department with the Texas Rangers that killed the old man Lonnie Curridge.”
I assured him that yes, I did know it, although I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Soon, I would be paying Cool a visit, and I aimed to find out just what happened with the Curridge family while they lived there.
5
The young girl at the coroner’s office had been refrigerated and Oak Cliff put off for the time being. Bennie Enders was, in all but name only, the official chief coroner of Tarrant County. The real sworn-in coroner was an eighty-two year old man with a case of the dropsy, and he hadn’t been into work or even
collected a paycheck in almost two years. Nonetheless, Enders refused to move into the old man’s office and thus, I found him in a little room about the size of a broom closet, filling out certificates of death and closing out cases that had been shipped out to either funeral homes or, finding no family, to the city, which buried them in paupers’ graves in one of two local graveyards.
“Bennie, you’re not stupid as you look.”
He looked up from a desk that looked like it came out of a school room.
“If I was, I don’t reckon I’d be here, Dutch,” he said.
He tossed me a stick of mentholatum.
“I got a bad one coming in,” he said. “Automobile accident on the Arlington Highway.”
I had been drinking for two hours. My nose felt numb. I held onto the stick, just in case.
“You knew that little girl cut herself up,” I said.
He pushed himself away from the little desk and stretched his legs.
“Well, maybe it crossed my mind,” he said. “It’s not really my job to do your job for you.”
It was his job to determine the cause of death, though. He knew I knew that much.
“Let me see your report,” I said.
The report was right in front of me, and it read pretty much as I figured. Unknown female, approximately thirteen years of age, found unresponsive. Cuts approximating a crude tattoo found on right arm. Suspected infection resulting in sepsis.
“Barring an autopsy,” Bennie said.
“Your best guess?”
He looked insulted.
“A highly educated one,” he said.
I read all I needed to read and tossed the single sad sheet of paper back down.
“You were holding out on me, Bennie.”
He didn’t seem bothered by that at all.
“You’re right, I was,” he said. “Here’s the thing, Dutch. Science says there’s a ninety-percent chance that this girl is right handed. That means most likely, she was not the person who cut those marks into her.”
I wasn’t up on my science enough to dispute him.
“There’s still a chance she did it,” I said.
He agreed.
“A chance. But just a chance. It’s more likely someone else did it, not intending anything sinister.”
“So it wasn’t murder,” I said.
Given no ulterior motive, I was most likely out of a job.
“Surely not,” Bennie said. “At worst, reckless conduct or something. Is there any law against it?”
When it came to thirteen-year-olds, I knew next to nothing.
“I wonder if the person who did it even knows what happened?” I said.
Bennie Enders was half a step ahead of me.
“I was hoping you would find out who she is,” he said, nodding to our friend in the cold storage. “It’s the only way we stand a chance of finding who did it to her.”
Word came from Dallas that their missing person was right handed, a fact that managed to encourage Bennie while making no difference whatsoever to me. This was followed shortly by a warning that the mother, now knowing that a possible match for her daughter had been located just twenty miles away, was in route to Fort Worth. That did make a difference.
“I really don’t want to be here when mom shows up, Bennie,” I said.
He reminded me I was part of an active investigation, and any information we received would likely go a long way toward solving the case. The mother— one Donnatella Silvestri from the Pill Hill area of East Kessler, the only part of Oak Cliff you might brag about living in— brought answers to questions we’d scarcely considered. No, thank Jesus, that wasn’t her daughter Ginny. But wait. Yes, the mother thought she recognized her.
“I’ve seen this girl before. I feel like I know her from somewhere.”
Feelings can lead you astray. I wasn’t impressed with anybody’s vague feelings.
“She a friend of your daughter’s?” I said.
The lady hemmed and hawed, asked if she could walk around and see the body from the other side, bent down to look closer. What I was impressed with was her non-squeamish character. So was Bennie.
“You have a job, Mrs. Silvestri?” he said.
She didn’t smile, but she stopped frowning for a moment.
“I left my husband a year ago,” she said. “Actually, I kicked him out of the house. When I did that, I had to go to work to pay bills. I took a job at the hospital. I’m not a nurse or anything like that, but I help out where I can.”
Not anything like that. I knew nurses. I knew it was a dirty job. I could pretty much guess that Donnatella Silvestri did the work the other nurses didn’t want to do. People like me and Slant Face Sanders could relate. I gave her my card and told her to get in touch if she thought of anything that might help us with the girl in question.
“And, while you’re here, tell me about your daughter, if you don’t mind.”
We all three walked out into the hall and lit up cigarettes.
Ginny Silvestri was sixteen years old, the only daughter of William and Donnatella Silvestri. William had demons he was dealing with. Laid off from the bomber plant, he took his frustrations out on Donnatella. Donnatella said she took it on the chin once. Left with Ginny for a few days and stayed with friends. Let him talk her into coming back, things were fine for a month or two. Then he hit her again. She said she had promised Ginny that he would leave the next time. She kicked him out of the house and changed the locks.
“My father had built the house with his own hands,” she said. “No way was I going to leave him with it.”
Donnatella Silvestri wasn’t a woman to be messed with. Ginny, unfortunately, was a more difficult problem. She had been shaken by the goings-on in the house, and her trouble wasn’t so easy to banish. With her father gone, she took everything out on her mother. Started pounding on her like she had seen her father do. Twice, she ran off. Saying she was going to find her daddy, she ended up with friends and then an aunt who was a student at Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth.
“With Bill’s sister being over here, I guess that was the main reason I was scared this might be Ginny,”
This time, the dust had settled with no sightings of Ginny, no phone call.
“I keep expecting a telephone call, either Ginny or the cops, you know,” her mother said. “I guess I’ve kind of just stopped expecting it as much.”
How long had Ginny been gone? Eight months. All of a summer and into a fall and winter as bleak as any on record.
“I don’t think she would make it if she’s out there in the kind of weather we’ve been having lately,” Donnatella said.
She found herself searching places she’d never noticed before. The corners of Elm Street, the darkest crooks of Oak Cliff, even Ninth Street and the rail yards of Cowtown. Places I called home.
“Can’t see someone like her being down there,” I said. It was a lie, but it was true that she certainly wouldn’t blend in. If she had been seen around Ninth or on Jacksboro, it’s a pretty good bet I would have known.
The girls on Jacksboro were hardened by years of bad luck and poor decisions. Hardened enough that when they landed there, they didn’t really feel it. Didn’t feel it when men like me pulled up in pickup trucks or Cadillacs and offered to pay for a little company. I had never been with anyone as young as Ginny, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think they weren’t out there. Girls and guys too.
“You got a picture of your daughter?”
My friend James Alto says that whole Indian thing about a person’s soul being stolen by a photograph is bunk, but he does subscribe to the notion that a certain energy can be carried around in one. When his father, who was known as Ned Crow, was dying in a hospital in Texarkana, Alto had carried a photograph of the old man, tucked next to his chest, night and day. When the news came that New Crow had gone on to the Happy Hunting Grounds, Alto pulled a match out of his pocket and burned the photograph right there in the newspaper warehouse. I was sta
nding right beside him when that happened. He never went to Texarkana. Had his funeral right there with me and a few other silent witnesses.
I promised to return the photograph of the young girl with the freckled face and gap-toothed smile that mimicked her mother’s. I put it in my shirt pocket for good luck, scratching Mrs. Silvestri’s work telephone number on the back before I did.
6
Cool Texas was nothing but a wide spot in the road. It wasn’t even on a map, so I wasn’t sure I was there until I asked the lady behind the counter of the only store in town.
“Yes, this is Cool,” she said. “What there is of it.”
I bought a carton of cigarettes and a case of beer and paid for it with change fished from the trouser pocket of a sure enough dead outlaw named John Modec. I say sure enough because he went by the name Dead John even before I killed him. Claimed to be an Indian, but he wasn’t. Wasn’t much of an outlaw either, as it turned out.
“Happen to know of any Curridges around here?” I said.
She pushed my change back across the counter at me.
“Curridges?”
“Courage is armor a blind man wears, the calloused scar of outlived despairs, courage is fear that has said its prayers,” I said. “My name is the same, only it isn’t. I spell it C-u-r-r-i-d-g-e.”
She seemed more confused than impressed.
“You believe that?” I said.
“Believe what?” she said.
“That courage is fear that has said its prayers,” I said. “Because I don’t. Karle Baker Wilson wrote that in a book called Burning Bush. I recommend the book, but with reservations. I can’t say I recommend saying your prayers. It’s a futile endeavor, far as I can see.”
An old man came walking through the door about that time and nodded to the girl.
“Used to be a farm just out of town, headed out Mineral Wells way,” she said. “Family that lived there might have been called Curridge, I think. Maybe it was Porridge.”
The old man walked up behind me, a little too close for my own personal comfort.
